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SA: Let's talk about Brewed Behavior—tell us what your mission is. TA: Our biggest service is helping small- to medium-size specialty-coffee roasters operate more efficiently. We review their concerns via e-mail or phone, typically sign an NDA, and then schedule an on-site visit to see the company in operation. Ten days before the trip, I ask for the past three years' financials. I review these myself, looking for SWOT (which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) in the numbers. After our discussions, financial analyses, and the visit, we are then equipped to report our findings and present qualified recommendations for next steps. Often it's understanding and controlling the price/ quality challenge in green sourcing. There is such a major expense and so little information for roasters at those volumes. Once we form a plan for green, we review their current offering and how it matches their target demographic. This is simply matching your green and roast profiles to your customer base. Often this gets lost in what the green buyer or roaster prefers—they don't always match up with whom they're selling to. It's a science, with a proprietary formula to apply it to coffee, but it works to make the client much more efficient. We buy green for 15 or 20 roasters at the moment. We create profiles, we manage QC on a monthly basis—anything to maximize the focus on consistent quality coffee for the client. We offer peace of mind. Should operations, sales, etc. be areas of opportunity, we go back and create templates for operations, work with salespeople in the classroom and in the field. We just opened a brick-and-mortar facility to support our QC lab business, in addition to offering private roasting, cupping, and business classes. On the producer side, we have built coveted relationships with producers over the past 20 or so years, at times when the path for them was to keep doing what your family did, producing quantity because quality was extra work. 94 barista magazine For that we feel they deserve to be rewarded. We do QC for them at no cost, and provide neutral feedback. We take roaster clients to visit them and bring them together at our private cuppings during the SCAA events each spring. We have a spoken agreement that if we introduce a roaster and they buy, they need to commit to a three-year relationship. SA: You've worked closely with the specialty roaster-retailer Taf, which operates in Greece and has produced several cofee champions. Can you tell us a little about your work with Taf? TA: Taf is an economic study in its own right. [Owner] Yiannis Taloumis came to me during the WBC in Copenhagen [in 2008] and we discussed helping him prepare a plan for growth in the Greek market. We did in-depth demographic studies, and hatched plan to prepare for growth. Ironically, the wheels began to fall of the Greek economy around the same time. I'll let Yiannis expand, but by creating a specialty-cofee focus to complement this 65-year-old, family cofee company, we prepared Taf to combat the downturn with a strategy focused on quality. SA: Switching gears: Tell us why your barista background plays a big role in your appointment as 2nd VP of the SCAA? TA: Mad props to the Roasters Guild and [its members'] contribution to the leadership of the organization. Tinking about this question makes me not only aware but proud of how this barista movement has progressed, as well. I guess domestically you could say it's grown up into the future leaders we always had hoped for, upon its inception. I think of all the shop owners, like bad boy Billy Wilson, who now has a family and three shops in Portland—watching people like him evolve into what they are now is so fulflling. Again, this is a people business. Cofee is the catalyst to improving lives both in producing and consuming countries.